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March 2009 Faculty Spotlight

Bill Ransom

Bill Ransom was a featured reader at Seattle’s Richard Hugo House in October. Ransom read from his latest book of poetry, The Woman and the War Baby (Yakima, Washington: Blue Begonia Press, 2008). The Woman and the War Baby is Ransom’s sixth published collection of poems.

Bob Haft

Bob Haft spent the month of September in Italy and France where he participated in a symposium with David Hockney on "Painting and Optics," was inducted as a member into the French honorary society "Les Mousquetaires d'Armagnac" (The Musketeers of Armagnac), traveled throughout Sicily visiting Greek and Roman ruins in preparation for next year's Greece and Italy program, and was awarded an exhibition of his photographs at a gallery near Lyon, France.

Carrie Margolin

Carrie Margolin was recently made a Fellow of the Western Psychological Association (WPA). She has served WPA in many capacities since 1983, and has been a member of the executive board for the last 10 years as the film program coordinator. The annual WPA Film Festival averages 40 hours of psychology-related educational films, with a combined viewing audience of about 800 attendees. She attends the annual convention each spring, along with her students enrolled in So You Want to be a Psychologist.

Doug Schuler’s

Doug Schuler’s book, Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008) was published in the fall. Schuler reports that 16 Evergreen faculty members, staff, and former students contributed to the patterns in the book and several current and former students assisted with its online companion. Doug has delivered a number of guest presentations this academic year, including "Civic Intelligence and Liberating Voices, A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution" and "Towards Liberating Voices 2.0: Augmenting a Large, Distributed Participatory Project." at the Graduate School for Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign. He also spoke at Virginia Tech and at the Center for Future Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab.

Frances Rains

Frances Rains has completed two book chapters. “Even When Erased, We Exist: Native Women Standing Strong for Justice” will appear this summer as part of In the Spirit of Ubuntu: Stories of Teaching and Research (Diane Caracciolo and Anne Mungai, eds. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2009). “American Indian Mothers Speaking from the Heart: Public Schools and their Children” is about efforts to implement decolonizing practices and will appear in Teaching Bilingual/Bicultural Children: Teachers Talk about Language and Learning, (Lourdes Diaz Soto and Haroon Khareem, eds. New York, New York: Teachers College Press, 2009). Frances shared authorship with Native women from Evergreen’s Reservation Based program; Melody Bidtah (Port Gamble S’Klallam Nation), Lovera Black Crow (Elwha Klallam Nation), Kara Horton (Port Gamble S’Klallam Nation), and Toni Jones (Nooksack Nation], were students between 2002 and 2005. Melody, Kara, and Toni have graduated, and Toni is currently earning her Masters degree at another institution. In the fall, Frances was invited by the Assistant Chancellor for Equity and Diversity at the University of Washington, Tacoma, to participate on a panel for the one-day symposium, Contemporary Native American Issues in Higher Education in October. Her presentation, “Reaching and Retaining Native Students at the University,” was geared towards college administrators, Tribal education directors, and Native pre-college students. Denny Hurtado was co-panelist for this session.

Gilda Sheppard

Gilda Sheppard delivered the opening keynote address at the 13th annual conference of Washington State Faculty and Staff of Color in Higher Education, held last October in Bellingham.

Greg Mullins and Julia Zay

In September, Greg Mullins and Julia Zay presented the work-in-progress of Evergreen faculty who are organizing the Human Rights Digital Archive. Greg and Julia spoke at the Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students, hosted by the Simpson Humanities Center at the University of Washington. The HRDA (Human Rights Digital Archive) was featured as a new initiative in community partnership and in publicly engaged humanities scholarship.

Helena Meyer-Knapp

Helena Meyer-Knapp is now or soon will be in Korea on a Fulbright Scholars Award. She will lecture on Peace Studies at Kyung Hee University from March through June.

Joanna Cashman

Joanna Cashman taught a master class in Modern Dance: Technique and Improvisation at the Bill Evans Pedagogy of Dance Intensive in Port Townsend. Professional dance educators from across the country gathered at this event to deepen their study of the Bill Evans method, a Laban/Bartenieff based approach to Modern Dance. Joanna also facilitated a 14 -day Radiant Health Yoga Teacher Training Intensive in Olympia; the program is designed in compliance with the Yoga Alliance’s national educational standards.

Mingxia Li and Zhang Er

Mingxia Li, appearing in her pen name of Zhang Er, delivered a lecture and a reading of her poetry at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. Her full-length collections of poetry include "Seen, Unseen" (QingHai Publishing House of China), "Water Words" (New World Poetry Press, Calif.), and most recently, "Because of Mountain" (TonSan, Taiwan). She writes in English and Chinese, and her works frequently appear in translation.

Nalini Nadkarni

Nalini Nadkarni’s book, Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees, was published by the University of California Press last summer (Berkeley, California, 2008). Nalini continues to be a member of the Contributing Board of Editors for The Olympian, and writes a quarterly column for the op-ed page. She was also re-elected to the Board of Trustees of The Nature Conservancy of Washington in 2008.

Nalini has for several years been introducing ecological research and sustainability practices in prisons, working with inmates and corrections administrators inside prison walls in Washington State. Her project to learn how to grow moss for the horticulture trade, and thus reduce destruction of old-growth habitat through unsustainable moss harvesting practices led to the 2008 publication of Sustainability research and practices in enforced residential institutions: collaborations of ecologists and prisoner, a paper she coauthored with an inmate (now released) in an international journal (C. Ulrich. & N. Nadkarni. 2008. Environment, Development, and Sustainability). Last summer, the state’s Department of Corrections and Evergreen negotiated an interagency agreement that provides $300,000 to the college for Nalini to extend sustainability projects to three other prisons through June 2010. This project has received considerable national and international attention, with stories appearing over 300 Associated Press news outlets, an article in the Russian edition of Newsweek, a televised segment on the KCTS (Channel 9) public affairs program “Connects,” a page on the National Science Foundation’s Web site, and a feature profile in the most recent edition of Miller-McCune magazine.

Nalini has been presenting and delivering guest lectures throughout the year, including at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Milwaukee, the TED conference in California, Unity College in Maine, and in Sweden, Washington, DC, Florida, and others. She received the 2008 Distinguished Achievement Award for the University of Washington, College of Forest Resources.

Peter Bacho

Peter Bacho was honored as an Asian American Pioneer by the Northwest Asian Weekly in October. Citing Peter’s career as an attorney, journalist, faculty member, and award winning novelist, Weekly reporter Evangeline Cafe said he received the honor because he “paved the way for Asian Americans in literature.”

Rebecca Sunderman

Rebecca Sunderman represents Evergreen in a working group of Washington higher education faculty and evaluation professionals who are developing an assessment to measure readiness for college mathematics. Since September, Rebecca has also been acting director of the QuASR Center while Vauhn Foster-Grahler teaches in the full-time 2008-09 program, Toward a Sustainable Puget Sound: Place, People and Policy.

Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz published two papers recently through the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF): “Military Child Care: A Government Success Story” with Dr. Shelley MacDermid of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University; and “Families and the Current Economic Crisis” with CCF intern Valerie Adrian. Stephanie’s recent op-eds include “Till Children Do Us Part” (New York Times, February 4, 2009), “Intimacy Unstuck” (Boston Globe, January 18, 2009), and “Women and the American Presidential Campaign” (Guatemala Times, October 22, 2008).

Here’s a list of external grants and contracts received by Evergreen during the past year or so: